Appearing before a parliamentary committee, Israeli chief peace negotiator Tzipi Livni outlined a vision she said she shared with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of an end to the decades-old conflict with the Palestinians.

“My policy and that of the prime minister is that a solution of two states for two peoples must be achieved,” said Livni, who heads a small centrist party in the governing coalition.

Far-right members of the government were having none of it, in a rare public clash of ideologies between political allies in Netanyahu’s administration since it took office in March.

“Two states for two peoples might be Netanyahu’s position, but it is not the official government position. It is not part of its basic guidelines,” Orit Struck of the Bayit Yehudi party said at the Foreign Affairs and Defence committee session.

The party’s leader, Naftali Bennett, repeatedly voiced his opposition to the establishment of a Palestinian state in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, saying it would ultimately be ruled by Muslim militants intent on destroying Israel.

Instead, the former Jewish settlement leader said, Israel should annex much of the West Bank, which it captured in the 1967 Middle East war along with East Jerusalem and Gaza.

Bennett took his party into Netanyahu’s government and has not publicly raised objections to restarting peace talks that collapsed in 2010 over Israeli settlement building – suggesting he did not have to because they stood no chance of success.

“It is our land,” Struck said of the West Bank, claiming an area many Israelis call by its Biblical name, Judea and Samaria.

“It is our land but the question is whether (Israel) stays our state or not,” Livni replied, in a nod to what some advocates of a land-for-peace accord fear would be the loss of Israel’s Jewish majority if it holds on to the West Bank.

Such divisions within the coalition herald political trouble for Netanyahu should U.S. peace efforts make progress. The leader of Israel’s main opposition Labour Party has already pledged to support him to offset any defections by hardliners if he clinches a deal with the Palestinians.

PALESTINIAN STATE

Netanyahu has voiced support for establishing a Palestinian state next to Israel under a future peace deal, but has said it must be demilitarized and that there can be no Israeli return to pre-1967 war lines, which he has called indefensible.

In addition, he has demanded that Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state, a condition they fear would be tantamount to waiving any right of return of Palestinian refugees, a main issue of the Israeli-Arab conflict.

Kerry was due to arrive in Israel on Thursday, on his fourth visit as secretary of state, for further talks with Israeli and Palestinian leaders on getting negotiations under way.

Silvan Shalom, Israel’s minister for regional cooperation and a member of Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party, said: The idea is to go together to announce the resumption of negotiations without precondition.

“We are awaiting an answer from the Palestinians. Are they willing or not to resume negotiations? The ball is in their court,” Shalom told Reuters.

Speaking to a U.N. committee in New York on Monday, the top Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, said: “Make no mistake, we are exerting every possible effort in order to see that Mr. Kerry succeeds.”

Kerry telephoned Netanyahu last week to voice U.S. concern at Israel’s plan to declare legal four unauthorised West Bank settler outposts, a U.S. official said in Muscat on Tuesday.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, gave no details about the call, triggered by a court document in which Israel said it had taken steps in recent weeks to retroactively authorize the four outposts built without official permission.

Most of the world deems all Israeli settlements in the West Bank as illegal. Israel disputes this and distinguishes between about 120 government-authorized settlements and dozens of outposts built by settlers without official sanction.

The main issues that would have to be resolved in a peace agreement include the borders between Israel and a Palestinian state, the future of Jewish settlements, the fate of Palestinian refugees and the status of Jerusalem.

Some 500,000 Israelis have settled in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. About 2.7 million Palestinians live in those areas.

(Additional reporting by Arshad Mohammed in Muscat; Editing by Alistair Lyon)

Although Israel has not publicly taken sides in the civil
war between Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and rebels trying
to topple him, Western and Israeli sources say it has launched
air strikes in Syria to destroy weapons it believed were
destined for Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

In public remarks at the weekly meeting of his cabinet,
Netanyahu made no direct mention of those attacks, but made
clear Israel was prepared to take action in the future and said
it was “preparing for every scenario” in the Syrian conflict.

Israel had set a policy “to prevent, as much as possible,
the leakage of advanced weapons to Hezbollah and terror
elements”, he said.

“We will act to ensure the security interest of Israel’s
citizens in the future as well,” Netanyahu added, describing his
government’s actions as “responsible, determined and
level-headed”.

Israel has neither confirmed nor denied reports it attacked
Iranian-supplied missiles stored near Damascus this month that
it believed were awaiting delivery to Hezbollah, which fought a
war with Israel in 2006 and is allied with Assad.

SUPERSONIC MISSILE

A Russian shipment of Yakhont anti-ship missiles to Syria
was condemned by the United States on Friday, and Israel is also
alarmed by the prospect of Moscow supplying S-300 advanced air
defence missile systems to Damascus.

Netanyahu held talks in Russia on Tuesday with President
Vladimir Putin on the Syrian crisis but gave no public
indication whether Israel’s concerns over the Russian weaponry
had been eased.

Amos Gilad, a senior Israeli Defence Ministry official, said
on Saturday the S-300 and the Yakhont, weapons that could
complicate any plans for foreign military intervention in Syria,
would likely end up with Hezbollah and threaten both Israel and
U.S. forces in the Gulf.

“Yakhont is a cruise missile that can hit targets at sea and
strategic targets. (It is) a supersonic missile, (with) a range
of 300 km, very sophisticated,” Gilad said on Israel’s Channel
Two television on Saturday.

“The Russians sent it to Syria, beside the strategic defence
system called the S-300. There are a number of versions, and
they are sending them one of the good versions,” he said.

General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of
Staff, said on Friday Russia’s delivery of anti-ship missiles to
Assad was “ill-timed and very unfortunate” and risked prolonging
a war that has already killed more than 80,000 Syrians.

A spokesman for Putin, while not responding directly to
assertions Russia had sent the anti-ship missiles, said Moscow
would honour contracts to supply Syria, a long-time weapons
customer.

(Editing by Mark Trevelyan)

The issue is at the heart of a long and emotional struggle
between Israel’s secular majority and an ultra-Orthodox Jewish
minority over lifestyle in the Jewish state.

“Today, I instructed the Justice Ministry to draft
legislation … that will make any segregation of women and
their humiliation in a public space a criminal offence,” Justice
Minister Tzipi Livni said on her Facebook page.

She made the announcement a day after Attorney-General
Yehuda Weinstein recommended outlawing any behaviour that stops
women from receiving “public services with equal conditions”.

The separation of women and men on bus lines through
religious neighbourhoods, and incidents in which Jewish zealots
have spat at schoolgirls they deemed to be dressed immodestly,
have raised public pressure on the government to act.

Now, with the power of ultra-Orthodox politicians diminished
by their exclusion from Israel’s governing coalition, Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s administration could find it
easier to win support for an anti-segregation law.

“Women in Israel won’t sit at the back of the bus. Women in
Israel will participate in state ceremonies and their voices
will be heard on radio stations and in the army,” Livni said.

She was referring to events at which religious politicians
and soldiers, adhering to a traditional edict to avoid
temptation, have walked out rather than watch women singing or
dancing, and to an ultra-Orthodox radio station’s refusal to
employ female announcers.

“The new law will be formulated in the coming weeks and help
the struggle against the shameful and violent phenomena of
cursing and spitting at women,” Livni wrote. “It will be another
step toward equality between men and women in Israel in 2013.”

But the legislation could also heighten militancy in an
ultra-Orthodox community whose state welfare benefits and
military service exemptions are under threat by the new
government Netanyahu formed in March.

Fears of vandalism by religious modesty squads have led
advertisers in Jerusalem, a holy city with a large Jewish
religious community, to avoid posting images of women on buses
and billboards, or at least toning down their clothing.

Women who insist on sitting in the front of buses in
Jerusalem have been subjected at times to verbal and sometimes
physical assault.

Jerusalem’s Western Wall, one of Judaism’s holiest sites,
and a bastion of ultra-Orthodox ritual practice, has also been
at the forefront of a challenge championed by women.

“Women of the Wall” – Jewish activists seeking equal rights
at the holy place where men and women pray in separate sections
- have gathered there monthly for worship sessions, donning
prayer shawls in defiance of Orthodox tradition.

Israeli police have detained the women in the past for
wearing the “talit”. But police say they will not intervene at
the next gathering, on Friday, after a judge ruled the women
were breaking no law.

(Editing by Mark Heinrich)

Palestinian leaders and neighboring Jordan condemned the arrest of Sheikh Mohammad Hussein, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem after Palestinian worshippers scuffled with Israelis near Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque on Tuesday.

Israeli President Shimon Peres sought to reassure Jordan, one of the few Arab powers to have recognized the Jewish state, that religious freedom in Jerusalem would be upheld.

Hussein’s arrest came the same day Israel celebrated the anniversary of its capture of East Jerusalem, where al-Aqsa is located, from Jordanian control in the 1967 Middle East war.

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said Hussein was arrested to answer questions about what he called the “public disturbance” near al-Aqsa, which overlooks Judaism’s Western Wall. Rosenfeld said no charges were filed after Hussein was questioned for six hours.

“They took me from my house at eight in the morning, accusing me of incitement,” Hussein told Reuters. “I do not incite. I protect al-Aqsa mosque, and that is the nature of my work.”

The Palestinian Authority appoints the Grand Mufti in consultation with local religious leaders, but Jordan’s monarchy, which has long been a custodian of the holy sites in Jerusalem, pays religious personnel’s salaries and contributes toward the upkeep of the shrines.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas condemned the arrest, calling it “a flagrant challenge to the freedom of worship”.

Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said it was a “grave escalation in Israel’s relentless violations of international law”.

Jordanian Prime Minister Abdullah Ensour told parliament that Amman would convey through its ambassador in Tel Aviv “the kingdom’s rejection of the Israeli army and settlers’ recurring and increasing attacks on the holy al-Aqsa”, and accused Israel of “premeditated acts that spelt evil intent”.

Israel considers all of Jerusalem its capital, though its occupation of the east of the city has never been recognized internationally. The Palestinians say East Jerusalem must be the capital of their future state.

PERES HOPES FOR PEACE

Officiating at a “Jerusalem Day” ceremony, Peres described Israel’s 1994 peace deal with Jordan as possible precedent for an accord with the Palestinians and inter-faith understanding.

“Jerusalem is dear to us. Peace with Jordan is dear to us. I want to say loudly and clearly that we respect all the holy sites of all religions and will do everything necessary to protect them as agreed between us,” Peres said.

Hussein, who has held his post since 2006, said it was the first time Israeli authorities had arrested and questioned him. Since 1967, at least one previous mufti had been detained by Israeli police, he said.

Rosenfeld said Tuesday’s confrontation began when Israeli police detained a Palestinian who wanted to enter the plaza but refused to present his identification card.

It developed into a scuffle in which Muslim worshippers threw chairs at Jewish visitors at the site, he added.

There were fresh confrontations on Wednesday between Muslims and Jews outside Jerusalem’s walled Old City, where al-Aqsa is located. Police arrested 18 Palestinians, Rosenfeld said. There were no casualties.

Al-Aqsa mosque is one of the most sensitive sites in the city. Muslims see it as one of their holiest places along with Mecca and Medina, believing the Prophet Mohammad ascended into heaven from the spot during a night journey to Jerusalem.

It is also the most sacred site in Judaism, with Jews revering it as the place where biblical King Solomon built the first temple 3,000 years ago. A second temple there was razed by the Romans in 70 AD.

The future status of Jerusalem is seen as one of the most difficult topics to be resolved in any negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians.

Direct talks between the two sides broke down in 2010. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is seeking to revive the discussions and was due to meet Israel’s chief negotiator Tzipi Livni in Rome later on Wednesday.

(Reporting by Ali Sawafta, Noah Browning, Ari Rabinovitch and Nidal al-Mughrabi; Editing by Jon Hemming and Mike Collett-White)

“We see there are fewer approvals for new construction in the West Bank since President Barack Obama visited (in March),” Yariv Oppenheimer, head of Peace Now, which monitors settlement activity in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, told Reuters. He said it was too early to give any numbers.

Israeli Army Radio reported that Netanyahu had met Housing Minister Uri Ariel to order a freeze in issuing tenders for new housing projects in settlements in the West Bank, effectively delaying construction of hundreds of homes.

The Haaretz newspaper, quoting unidentified senior officials, said Netanyahu had promised U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry that he would refrain until mid-June from publishing new tenders in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, areas that Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war.

In Jerusalem, a spokesman for Netanyahu, who is visiting China, had no immediate comment. Kerry is engaged in a fresh U.S. diplomatic campaign to revive peace talks, which collapsed in 2010 over Israel’s continued expansion of settlements.

Ariel, interviewed on Army Radio, declined to confirm or deny that a freeze was in place.

“I am not commenting. A minister sits with his prime minister. If they want to go public, they have ways to go public. If they want for it stay between them, it will stay between them,” Ariel said.

“UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU WANT”

Ariel was pressed to say whether he was unhappy with the freeze order. “You can understand whatever you want,” he replied.

Ariel is a member of the far-right Jewish Home party, whose leader, Naftali Bennett, has advocated annexing parts of the West Bank.

The Palestinians, who demand a halt to settlement activity as a condition for returning to peace negotiations, want to establish a functioning state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

In an apparent effort to give U.S. diplomacy a chance, the Palestinians have not applied in recent months to join any world organizations after the de facto recognition of Palestinian statehood at the United Nations last November.

After the U.N. vote, which was opposed by Israel and the United States, Netanyahu decided to build 3,000 more settler homes in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

But during his visit to Israel and the West Bank, Obama reiterated U.S. displeasure, saying that continued settlement activity was “counterproductive to the cause of peace”.

A 10-month moratorium on housing starts in settlements in 2009 led to a brief resumption of peace talks. Netanyahu says the Palestinians should now return to negotiations unconditionally, a position echoed by Washington.

The settlements that Israel has built in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are considered illegal by most countries. Israel cites historical and biblical links to the two areas, where about 500,000 Israelis and 2.5 million Palestinians now live.

(Additional reporting by Ari Rabinovitch; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

Allegations of Syrian government forces using chemical weapons have grabbed headlines and driven new calls for U.S. President Barack Obama to intervene in Syria’s civil war.

But when it took military action over the weekend while Washington stayed on the sidelines, Israel was homing in on targets with strategic significance for its own possible war with Iran rather than for Syria’s internal fighting.

In both Israeli attacks, on Friday and Sunday, long-range, Iranian-supplied missiles destined for Lebanon’s Hezbollah guerrilla group were hit, Israeli and Western sources said.

Such weapons, along with what Israel believes to be a Hezbollah arsenal of about 60,000 other rockets, could pose a significant threat to Israeli cities in any future conflict.

Although the militant group could opt to strike any time, Israeli officials are particularly concerned about Hezbollah missile barrages as proxy retaliation should Israel carry out long-threatened attacks against Iranian nuclear facilities.

“We have very clear guidelines. We will not let game-changing weaponry reach the hands of Hezbollah. We will do whatever is necessary to stop that,” said Ofer Shelah of the Yesh Atid party, a member of Israel’s governing coalition.

Shelah, who also sits on parliament’s foreign affairs and defense committee, was referring to a “red line” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has set on the Syrian conflict. “Beyond that, it is a murky situation,” Shelah added, pointing to Israeli ambivalence over the fate of President Bashar al-Assad.

NO BLUFF

A red line that Netanyahu famously drew for Iran’s uranium enrichment program, in a cartoon bomb produced during a speech at the United Nations last September, has seemed more flexible.

Last week, Netanyahu, who forecast Iran would cross the line in mid-2013, said it was still short of that mark. This raised further doubts over whether Israel would opt, against long-standing U.S. advice, to launch a unilateral strike against what it believes is an Iranian bid to develop nuclear weapons.

For Israel, the threshold will be reached once Iran, which denies seeking atomic arms, will have amassed enough uranium at 20-percent fissile purity that could quickly be used to fuel just one nuclear bomb.

Amos Yadlin, a former chief of Israeli military intelligence, said Israel’s strikes in Syria sent a strong message to Iran that Netanyahu was not bluffing.

“Iran is testing the determination both of Israel and the U.S. regarding red lines, and what it sees in Syria is that at least some of the players take the red lines seriously,” Yadlin told Army Radio, appearing to take a dig at Washington’s inaction so far.

Obama, in an interview on Saturday with the Spanish-language network Telemundo, said “the Israelis justifiably have to guard against the transfer of advanced weaponry” to Hezbollah.

Uzi Rubin, an Israeli missile expert and former defense official, said the Fateh-110 missile reportedly targeted in the Israeli strikes “is better than the Scud, it has a half-ton warhead”. It may also be more accurate than other rockets.

CALM EXTERIOR

Signaling that Israel was not overly concerned about possible retaliation by Assad’s forces or Hezbollah for the air strikes, Netanyahu planned to leave later in the day for a five-day visit to China, Israeli officials said.

But two of Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile batteries were deployed near the northern fronts with Syria and Lebanon – Hezbollah’s homeland. Netanyahu also convened a last-minute meeting of his security cabinet before his planned departure.

“Our estimate is that Assad will not respond to this by attacking Israel,” one Israeli official said. “He knows that doing so would draw counter strikes that will seriously impair his military capabilities and therefore potentially allow the rebels to even their odds against him.”

Technically, Israeli is still at war with Syria following the 1973 Yom Kippur war, but in reality the northern borderlands have been relatively quiet for the past four decades.

The air strikes on Syria caused no immediate political fallout in Israel, where containment of Hezbollah – which fired more than 4,000 rockets into the country during a war in 2006 – is a consensus issue that unites people across party lines.

Illustrating concern over Hezbollah, Amos Gilad, a senior Defense Ministry official, said in a lecture in the southern city of Beersheba on Saturday that the group was “keen to take weapons systems (in Syria), like rockets that can reach, say, all the way here”.

Hezbollah portrays itself as arming against aggression by Israel, which occupied southern Lebanon for two decades until 2000 and with which Lebanon still has territorial disputes.

Netanyahu has given no public sign of planning a military intervention in Syria, despite the occasional spillover of fire from the conflict into the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

In the Israeli attack on Friday, Israeli planes did not enter Syrian air space, U.S. officials said, apparently firing at their targets from neighboring Lebanon to avoid any direct confrontation with Assad’s military. It was not immediately clear whether the same held true for Sunday’s strike.

Taking sides in Syria is problematic: Israelis believe one in 10 of the rebels fighting Assad, who has followed his father in keeping the peace on the Golan since 1974, is a jihadist who might turn his gun on them once the Syrian leader were gone.

Tzachi Hanegbi, a Netanyahu confidant and a legislator from his right-wing Likud party, told Army Radio on Sunday Israel had no position on whether Assad should stay or go, adding that the government did not want to “bet on the wrong horse”.

“What we want,” he said, “Is to ensure that within the Syrian chaos we will not see Hezbollah growing stronger, in a way that will motivate it to act against us and draw us into a conflict in which we will suffer grave casualties.”

(Additional reporting by Maayan Lubell, Crispian Balmer and Dan Williams; Editing by Alastair Macdonald)

There was also bloodshed in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where for the first time since 2011, a Palestinian killed a Jewish settler. Israeli soldiers shot and wounded the attacker after he stabbed the man at a busy intersection.

Both incidents held the potential of wider confrontation – along the Gaza frontier, where factions linked to al Qaeda have been carrying out intermittent rocket attacks, and in the West Bank, where clashes between stone-throwing Palestinians and the Israeli military intensified in recent months.

Israel said the Palestinian killed in the air strike, Haitham Al-Mes-hal, 29, was a jihadi who was an expert in making rockets. It accused him of involvement in a rocket attack from Egypt’s Sinai peninsula against Israel’s Red Sea resort of Eilat on April 17, which had caused no injuries or damage.

“I had said we would not sit by quietly and let this pass … we will not accept a drizzle of fire from Gaza or from Sinai,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said after the strike.

Islamist militants in Gaza have fired sporadically at Israel in the past weeks despite an Egyptian-brokered truce that ended an eight-day conflict in November in which rockets hit Israeli cities and Israeli warplanes struck Palestinian territory.

Hamas, an Islamist group close to the Muslim Brotherhood now ruling neighboring Egypt, has cracked down on hardline Salafi rivals it sees as jeopardizing its control of the Gaza Strip.

Egypt, which signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, has also battled militants in Sinai, where lawlessness has mounted since President Hosni Mubarak’s downfall in 2011.

In Gaza, Mes-hal’s body was wrapped in a black flag of the Salafi factions after the air strike, near a Hamas training camp. “The Sword of Islam” Salafi group, threatened to avenge his death, saying “the response will come very soon”.

An Islamist website that carries statements from al Qaeda-related groups, described Mes-hal as a leader of Magles Shoura Al-Mujahideen, which claimed responsibility for the Eilat hit.

Hamas appeared to take softer tone. A spokesman for the movement, Fawzi Barhoum, said the Israeli attack was “unjustified and a dangerous escalation”, but he urged Egypt to press Israel “to abide by calm and stop the aggression”.

STABBING

In the nearby West Bank, the killing of Eviatar Borovsky, 31, stoked anger among settlers, who complained the military had failed to respond strongly to mounting stone-throwing incidents.

Borovsky’s attacker, who a military spokesman said grabbed his weapon after stabbing him, was identified as Salam Assad Az-Zaghal of the mainstream Fatah movement. Palestinian officials said he was released two months ago from an Israeli prison after serving a 3-1/2-year term.

Ghassan Daghlas, a Palestinian official in the West Bank city of Nablus, said settlers launched “large-scale attacks” in four villages in the territory after the incident.

“They are throwing stones and attempted to set a house on fire. They also hurled rocks at a school bus and smashed its windows. The situation is going from bad to worse. A mosque was also attacked,” Daghlas said.

Nine Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank since the beginning of the year, mainly in clashes that have risen sharply in recent months, raising fears that a third popular uprising, or Intifada, might be in the offing.

The Palestinians want to establish a state in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, territories Israel captured in a 1967 war. Peace talks between the sides broke down in 2010.

(Additional reporting by Ali Sawafta in Ramallah and Ori Lewis in Jerusalem; Editing by Crispian Balmer and Alison Williams)

(Members of “Women of the Wall” group pray at the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City April 11, 2013.  REUTERS/Baz Ratner )

Women seeking equal prayer rights at the Western Wall are planning a further challenge to Jewish Orthodox tradition at the site after a court ruling bolstered their cause, an activist said on Sunday.

The Women of the Wall movement hopes to have its members read from a Torah (holy scriptures) scroll at the Jerusalem site, a ritual reserved under Orthodox practice for men only, when it holds its monthly prayer session there on May 10, according to Anat Hoffman, a leader of the group.

The women have already broken with tradition in gatherings at the Western Wall, which is divided into separate men’s and women’s sections, by wearing prayer shawls that Orthodox law says only men should don.

Israeli police, saying they were enforcing Supreme Court guidelines on keeping the peace and following local customs at the site, have routinely arrested women worshippers from the group during the prayer meetings.

The protests have exposed a rift between Israel’s government, which supports Orthodox practice at the Western Wall, and the U.S. Jewish Reform and Conservative movements, in whose synagogues men and women sit together.

In a ruling that Women of the Wall called revolutionary, the Jerusalem District Court said on Thursday that customs change and women should not be arrested for wearing prayer shawls at the site.

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Lebanon’s Hezbollah militant group, which sent a drone deep into Israel in October, said it was not behind the latest incident. Israel’s military held back from accusing the group, saying an investigation was under way.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he was flying in a military helicopter to an event in northern Israel when the unmanned aircraft was spotted along the Lebanese coast by Israeli air defences. His helicopter landed briefly until the interception was completed.

There was no indication from Israeli officials who provided information about the incident that Israel suspected any connection between the dispatch of the drone and Netanyahu’s flight, whose details had not been made public.

“I view with great gravity this attempt to violate our border. We will continue to do what is necessary to defend the security of Israel’s citizens,” Netanyahu said in a speech at his destination, a Druze village where he met community leaders.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the alleged aerial infiltration.

In a statement, Hezbollah denied sending “any surveillance plane towards the occupied Palestinian land”.

Six months ago, a Hezbollah drone flew some 35 miles (55 km)into southern Israel before being shot down by an F-16.

Israel and Hezbollah fought a war in 2006, and Lebanon has complained to the United Nations about frequent Israeli over flights, apparently to monitor the group’s activities.

The military said the drone shot down on Thursday was detected in Lebanese skies and intercepted by an F-16 fighter jet 5 nautical miles west of the Israeli port city of Haifa.

A military spokesman said the unmanned aircraft had been flying at an altitude of about 6,000 feet and had been monitored by Israel for about an hour before it was destroyed by an air-to-air missile.

“We don’t know where the aircraft was coming from and we don’t know where it was actually going,” the spokesman said.

On Monday, Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon said Israel would not permit “sophisticated weapons” to fall into the hands of Hezbollah “or other rogue elements” in Syria’s civil war.

“When they crossed this red line, we acted,” Yaalon said at a news conference with U.S. Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel, in comments widely interpreted as confirming reports that an Israeli air strike in Syria in January had targeted a Hezbollah-bound arms convoy.

(Editing by Andrew Roche)

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he was flying in a military helicopter to an event in northern Israel when the unmanned aircraft was spotted along the Lebanese coast by Israeli air defenses. His helicopter landed briefly until the interception was completed.

There was no indication from Israeli officials who provided information about the incident that Israel suspected any connection between the dispatch of the drone and Netanyahu’s flight, whose details had not been made public.

“I view with great gravity this attempt to violate our border. We will continue to do what is necessary to defend the security of Israel’s citizens,” Netanyahu said in a speech at his destination, a Druze village where he met community leaders.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the alleged aerial infiltration.

Asked whether Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed Lebanese guerrilla group that sent a drone into southern Israel in October, was behind the incident, a military spokesman said an investigation was under way and the navy was trying to salvage wreckage from the aircraft.

“On my way here, in a helicopter, I found out there was an infiltration attempt by a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) into Israeli air space,” Netanyahu said in the Druze village of Julis, some 15 km (9 miles) from the Lebanese border.

“Within a short time, Israeli pilots intercepted this aircraft and shot it down over the sea.”

The military said the unmanned aerial vehicle was detected in Lebanese skies and intercepted by a F-16 fighter jet some 5 nautical miles west of the Israeli port city of Haifa.

A military spokesman said the drone had been flying at an altitude of about 6,000 feet and had been monitored by Israel for about an hour before it was destroyed by an air-to-air missile.

“We don’t know where the aircraft was coming from and we don’t know where it was actually going,” the spokesman said.

In the incident in October, a Hezbollah drone flew some 35 miles into southern Israel before being shot down by an F-16.

Israel and Hezbollah fought a war in 2006, and Lebanon has complained to the United Nations about frequent Israeli overflights, apparently to monitor the group’s activities.

On Monday, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon said Israel would not permit “sophisticated weapons” to fall into the hands of Hezbollah “or other rogue elements” in Syria’s civil war.

“When they crossed this red line, we acted,” Yaalon said at a news conference with U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, in comments widely interpreted as confirming reports that an Israeli air strike in Syria in January had targeted a Hezbollah-bound arms convoy.

(Editing by Alison Williams)